Curtains: A Story

In such a room as this unnumbered years may idly pass, with bare attention failing even cognisance of setting forth.

And barely can I slight recall youthful efforts of contortion, where with pride and hopefulness I’d strive against that slumping weight – collapsing, entropic. Embracing folds of couch and cushion to permit at last this body’s single tangible inclination, to fit itself into contours, shaped by this room’s demands. The body is a ne’er-do-well that years and age and curtained time reduce, and render in degraded form. And soil is my destination.

An entertainment I have found, a solace in my age, is to finger the creases of my skin and not so frightfully observe the minutes passing as I do it. This is a pleasure and a joy that I admit I never once achieved, my many and despair-driven efforts notwithstanding. Never created the basic brilliance that is my ancient fingers amusing themselves among the crevices of my ancient face. I trace and cross them as though they were a puzzle that I had all my life to solve, with no desire to solve at all.

And I sit wedded to my chair since any act is barely less than I can bear, and I am reminded of myself, much younger then, a younger man, when self-medicating I would prescribe myself certain substances and in them I would find myself not answering bodily demands til these became shrill sufficient that the very substance itself failed now to vanquish them.

I am alone up here, more alone than I ever would have thought I could be. But from an ancient, imbecilic storeman’s storehouse of anecdote and impression – mean and starved though it be – on the subject of the company of others I know that I can tell you of two – for starters – failings of the human being’s imagination, and so I will do so.

The first is this. That we – and by that I mean you and me – ascribe to others motives to account for their every act, when for ourselves we know too well that what we do eludes our understanding a good bit more than for example what we don’t. Far from motive-driven, we are merely the fleshy sacks we find ourselves in, packaging for a wilful being that can be described as much by its confusion as by its caprice.

The second is this. That we – again I mean you and me – hear another’s memories and imagine them distant from the listening moment in time, history, while all the while knowing surely that our own memories are nothing of the sort – past – but rather are conditions of the present, with us now, ageless, immediate to the mind.

She came to me when my middle age was late but had not yet begun to descend the slope of utter decrepitude you find me now nearing the base of. I invited her back to enjoy the benefits of my sagacity, and I commented daily, critically and comfortingly, on her efforts to express her self in some creative form, and oh, perhaps my hopes for her derived themselves from a mangled intuition – that how she appeared in my room and how her lip sat slightly open while we dissected her upon my table, and how the strands of hair tickled her neck and her shoulders – that these gestures were themselves the representations she was striving to project, that that was why the tension of near-arrival hung around like an odour.

Until the day I frankly told her no, it was no use, I had been wrong, she really was no good at all. She sniffed, and her voice caught, and I knew that she believed me as she exited in an absurdity of shame and awkwardness.